Friday, May 27, 2016

A FRANK DISCUSSION

Opening in the Valley this weekend:

Weiner—In case you’re wondering whether the title of this
documentary about the Anthony Weiner scandal has a double meaning, the
filmmakers open it with a quote from Marshall McLuhan: “The name of a man is a
numbing blow from which he never recovers.”

For the whole first decade of this century, Anthony Weiner
was the Congressman from New York’s
9th District, after a couple of terms on the New York City Council,
to which he was first elected at just 27. He had what looked like a hugely
promising future as the sort of Democrat that Democrats often pray
for—passionate and flamboyantly combative, possessed of the common touch, smart
without seeming feckless or elitist. Put simply, he wasn’t a wussy.

How far Weiner would, or should, have gone in national
politics is debatable—the short fuse that helped make him popular with New
Yorkers could have been a problem for him in Iowa
or Wisconsin.
It’s also a moot point, as Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011 over a scandal
that arose from “sexting”—he tweeted a picture of his…well, you know, to a
woman not his wife, along with other sexually explicit messages, and some of
these were leaked to the media.

Then he ran for Mayor of New York in 2013, and for a while
was in the lead in the Democratic primary. But more dirty tweets from him showed
up in the media, dating, insanely, from after the initial scandal. As far as
anyone can tell, Weiner never had any actual contact with the recipients of
these messages, nor were any laws broken, but two times was one time too many
for New York voters. Weiner doggedly stayed in the race, but was crushed, and
Bill De Blasio went on to be elected Mayor.

The film, directed by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg, mostly
focuses on the Mayoral race. Weiner and his wife, Hillary Clinton aide Huma
Abedin, gave the filmmakers extraordinary, reality-TV-like access to their
lives. In private, Weiner shows little of the swagger and bravado he does in
his public appearances. Padding around his apartment in shorts, under the
disapproving stare of Abedin, his face a mask of sheepish chagrin, he looks
like a prematurely old man—when he’s playing with his baby son, he looks like
he’s playing with his grandson.

There’s an inevitable comic edge to much of Weiner, and I wish I could have found
the movie funnier. Mostly it made me furious, at a variety of targets.

The first, most obvious and perhaps most deserving is the
title character himself. However outrageously hypocritical you may find the
prudish response to Weiner’s tweets, however much you may think it was nobody’s
business but his and his wife’s, he, like Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky
scandal, should simply have known better. The movie raises, without offering an
answer, the question of the judgment of powerful men when it comes to sex. It
also offers no insight into the urge so many men seem to feel to send women
pictures of their junk.

Having said that, and without minimizing Weiner’s
disgraceful recklessness in the least, there are plenty of other directions
toward whom the film arouses anger. Where, for instance, is the pressure on the
current Republican front runner to drop out of the race, in light of public
statements about women compared to which sending a picture of your dick seems
almost sweet?

But the scene in Weiner
that most infuriated me takes place at a campaign event. A large contingent of
media is there, and Weiner begins by asking if anyone has an “on-topic question”;
that is, a question about the relevant issue he’s there to discuss. Tense
silence. A few seconds later, of course, they’re all babbling dick-picture
questions at him simultaneously.

Really? Not one? Not one of those assholes who call
themselves journalists could muster one
on-topic question? If you asked them separately, I bet many if not most of them
would bemoan the state of contemporary journalism, but it didn’t seem to occur to
them that they had a clear shot at practicing real journalism, and declined.
Maybe, just maybe, if somebody had started with a question or two about an
actual issue, it would at least have made the first guy to ask a dick-picture
question feel a little stupid.

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My work has appeared in publications ranging from the New Times weeklies (where I was a staff writer for several years) to USA Today, from Phoenix Magazine and Wrangler News and the East Valley Tribune to the Erie Times-News, Seattle Times and Detroit Metro Times to Rewind Magazine.

I'm that rare example of a living poet who has had a sonnet published in Weird Tales, and my poems have also appeared in Elysian Fields Quarterly.

I've acted in theatre productions in six states and the District of Columbia, and appear for about six seconds as an extra (a prison guard) in the John Waters film Cry-Baby.

I directed Shakespeare's Measure for Measure at Southwest Shakespeare Festival, and a short film called Holding Back the Dawn, based on a short story by my friend Barry Graham.

I was host of Another Saturday Night, a pop culture and film review show on KTAR radio.

I have produced, directed and acted in radio plays for NPR, KTAR and the Sun Sounds Radio service.